Huffman Coding

There are two basic ways of operating a business.

The first way is to offer a good product at a fair price. There is a continuum here, because you could also offer an extrodinary product at an inflated price or a mediocre product at a cheap price. But I digress.

The other way is to gouge your customers. Give you customers a bad deal and hope they don’t notice [insert link to a Marysville Ford dealership here] or hide the price from the customer until it is too late for him.

A several years ago, I had AT&T long distance and was paying 15 cents a minute for most of my toll calls. The plan was creatively called the “10 cent a minute plan.”

When Sprint (the long distance company, not the cell phone one) offered me a no-monthly fee “7 cent a minute plan” with the first 50 minutes free each month, I didn’t see a catch. So I switched and started paying 10 cents a minute for most of my toll calls. It too was a creatively named plan, but at least it was cheaper.

At least until I called my Canadian niece on her sixteenth birthday. They charged me the “overseas” rate of $1.55 a minute so the 38 minute call came to around $70. And I wasn’t even aware that Lake Erie was a sea.

It doesn’t cost near Sprint that much to route the call: It is pure price gouging. If you sign up for their $3 per month international plan, the same call is 3 cents a minute.

No one I know would willing pay $1.55/minute for a phone call, but they get away with it because they hide the price from you when you sign up of the phone service. Afterward, I looked on their website for the phone rates. It took numerous clicks to get to the PDF file that had the rate buried inside it.

What is surprising though is that they don’t lose more customers after surprising them with this exorbidant rate. They certainly lost me. Had they charged me the merely outrageous rate of, let’s say, 30 cents a minute I would have grumbled but probably stayed as a customer. But by charging me what they did, they almost guaranteed that I they would not have me as as customer the following month. They will generate $0.00 in revenue from me from now on.

Since I have broadband, I jumped to the Voice-over-IP company Vonage with their $14.99 plan for all my land line calls. So the big loser here is SBC who will no longer make $300/year from me. [Insert ironic remark here mentioning how my company sells networking hardware to SBC but not Vonage.]

The deal I found was for a free Linksys box [Insert ironic remark mentioning how Linksys is owned by Cisco, one of my company's competitors], free Vonage activation and a $50 Gift Certificate on top. Nothing is painless however: it required that I fill in 3 rebates that all were set to expire Saturday. And I hate rebates.

As I was checking out Friday, I pointed to the flyer I had brought with me and told him I wanted all three rebates. (I was paranoid about getting every rebate.) Although he told me they were all in there as he handed me the bag, it didn’t seem like it and less than a minute after I exited the store I was back at the Customer Service counter showing another guy that I only had received two rebate forms at the checkout counter. The second guy took my receipt and had to consult with a third guy. Turns out I had to buy an activation card (for $0.00) in order to get another receipt and the final rebate form.

Friday night I unpacked the CompUSA bag and the receipt for the original VoIP box, required for all three rebates, was missing. Turns out guy number two had kept it in the mix up. So I spent Friday night putting together two girls bikes instead. Arguably that should have been my priority anyway.

Saturday I went back to CompUSA and, thankfully, guy number two was there so I didn’t have to explain myself again. The receipt had since been thrown away, but he easily printed off another. This is good, because I had to activate the account over the Internet that day to get the rebates.

With a busy day, I figured I would plug everything and register with the computer after the girls went to bed. With a 9 pm ice cream run, that was later than it normally was, but would still have a couple of hours to spare. As we drove home from the ice cream place, we saw that the entire neighborhood was dark.

The power was out.